By comparing The God of Small Things and Paradise of the Blind, explore the concept of classism and how it affects our place in the world and contributes to our development as moral and ethical beings. Literature has the ability to help readers discover and understand different cultures and traditions, and it can often alter a reader’s perspective of the world and their place in it. Throughout Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Dương Thu Hương’s Paradise of the Blind, the characters often find themselves restrained by their social class, which impacts negatively on their childhoods and results in many injustices. Both novels delve deep into the effects of being in a low social class and the injustice it can cause. In The God of Small …show more content…
Set during a time when communism was quickly spreading through Vietnam, aspirations for an equal society were forming. This contrasts greatly to the social system evident in The God of Small Things. Narrated by the main protagonist Hang, a young Vietnamese women growing up in an age of turmoil during post-war Vietnam, Paradise of the Blind gives readers a deeper insight into the contrasting lives of those from different social classes. Through Hang’s memory the reader is shown the difficulties in her life which eventually leads to her becoming an exported worker in Russia. Chinh, Hang’s uncle and a communist party member often used his authority to attempt to waver the opinion of those around him, “The merchants, the petty tradespeople, they’re only exploiters. You cannot remain with these parasites,” by referring to the landowning classes as parasites, it shows his political view and his belief in class segregation. The metaphor Duong uses comparing the landowning class to ‘parasites’ emphasises the extreme disdain Chinh and many other communists at the time had for the landowning class. It is also ironic for Chinh to describe the landowning class as ‘exploiters’, as they have done no wrong. Chinh and other communist members are the real exploiters. This concept of class superiority and segregation is also similarly expressed in The …show more content…
Duong’s novel depicts a Vietnam caught up from the 1950’s through the 1980’s in turmoil and chaos. Many of the ‘land owning class’ were forced to flee their homeland or were sentenced to forced labour camps, this is shown in the novel through the characters Aunt Tam and her brother Ton, both dispossessed of their property. Through Paradise of the Blind Duong is able to personalise the struggles of the working class during these times of political change and criticise the Vietnamese government, “Their fate hung from a thread; and just as an overripe fruit hangs from a branch, they could fall at any moment.” The comparison made between one’s fate and an overripe fruit that could fall at any moment depicts the power that the government had over the people and the many injustices that can occur. Despite doing no wrong, their social class is enough for them to be considered the enemy. This mirrors the lives of the Untouchables in The God of Small Things, namely Velutha whose future is determined by his social status. Duong adopts many differing literary techniques to criticise the actions of the Vietnamese government during the 1950s, “You say our dances are decadent. But haven’t you done some dancing yourself? Invisible dances, infinitely more decadent than ours.” Here Duong compares western style dance and music to the fraudulent actions of
In this chapter, O’Brien contrasts the lost innocence of a young Vietnamese girl who dances in grief for her slaughtered family with that of scarred, traumatized soldiers, using unique rhetorical devices
The story focuses on her great-grandfather, who was in disapproval of the French occupation of Vietnam, but still excelled at his job as a Mandarin under the puppet imperial court, fearing persecution of his family if he were to resign. In this section, the author also mentions more about the how the values of confusion had influenced the Vietnamese people in attempts to justify her great grandfather’s
This work documented the human experience in a light that I would not have seen it had I only read the books assigned to me in class. The themes in this book and how they were portrayed helped me to be able learn symbolism a bit better and also to understand my own life more clearly.
Both Hosseini and Hinton, although writing about very different scenarios, characterize the same theme in each of their novels - class separations harm all people. Learning from their work, we can aim to break down these barriers between social classes and bridge the gap between our separated societies.
The salient ideas in the novel are religion, culture, and materialism. This three are the major struggles through which the protagonist encounters throughout his existence. The auxiliary points are sin, gender inequality, and communication. These ones play a less outstanding, but a substantial part in the protagonist’s life.
Classism is seen at both institutional and individual levels and in many forms. Institutionally, it may surface in the manner financial aid is handled versus traditional tuition on a university’s campus. Individually, on that same campus, it may be displayed in the manner students from different backgrounds are received by a Greek organization. Classism can be insidious as stereotypes and myths, contempt and dislike, or contact avoidance, or as menacing as discriminatory practices in housing, employment, and schooling. One of the strongest stereotypes associated with low-income persons are those which equate members of this group with laziness, uncleanness, immoral behavior, deviance and limited intelligence (Spencer Ontario (LCO), 2009; Woods, Kurtz-Costes, & Rowley, 2004)
Bone portrays an aspect of Chinatown that no history book or lesson can accomplish. By allowing readers to read through and live through the characters, readers viscerally grasp the tension and frustration of the characters as they each strive to find acceptance among themselves and family members, and to form an identity as either a Chinese or an American. Through harsh economic circumstances that require a father to work overseas and a mother to work in sweatshops to provide for the upbringing of their children, the experiences of the Leong family demonstrate the arduous life of immigrants. Also, the story of Ona and her subsequent suicide plays a key element in the story of the Leong family, allowing us to understand the social impact of her life as an Asian American and the ultimate complexities of life in Chinatown.
The Vietnam War caused great destruction in Laos, and so the Lee family migrated to America, after spending a short time in refugee camps in Thailand. After settling in America, Foua gives birth to Lia, who unbeknownst to them will suffer from epilepsy soon after she is born. For four years, little Lia is admitted to hospital seventeen times, after suffering both grand and petit mal seizures. Through miscommunication and a failure to understand each other’s cultural differences, both the parents of Lia, and her American doctors, are ultimately at fault for Lia’s tragic fate, when she is left in a vegetative state.
This is an odd little book, but a very important one nonetheless. The story it tells is something like an extended parablethe style is plain, the characters are nearly stick figures, the story itself is contrived. And yet ... and yet, the story is powerful, distressing, even heartbreaking because the historical trend it describes is powerful, distressing, even heartbreaking.
The novel is starkly realistic. With the Joads as they travel, we meet the dark underside of capitalism with its uncontrolled poverty, its inhuman greed and human cost, and sense a fractured trust between government and people. The underside cont...
In today’s society, people are more concerned with their own “little world,” rather than looking at the extensive perspective of life. One reason why people can sometimes be classified as being “blind” is because people fear the unknown, and rejects the unfamiliar. Many people are not comfortable with stepping out of their shell and exploring their surroundings, let alone trying to look through the eyes of the segregated minority. In the novel Blindness, Jose Saramago metaphorically uses the word “blindness” as a term meaning, the truth that we cannot bear to see. To avoid the outside world, many people tend to shelter themselves from the obvious reality, and tend to focus of their “own” meaning of reality.
The idea that resulted in the Little Seamstress leaving the mountain maybe viewed as ironic by the reader. The ideas of being different and individual, that Lou held and put to practice were what communist Leader Chair man Mao Zedong originally feared. This was why the texts were originally banned in the first place, and viewed as revolutionary trash. As it was thought that they may result in an u...
Mitgang tells us that the novel is about the life of two children who live in a small town, where they deal with racism in society. Prejudice surrounds their childhood, and it lurks with them while they are playing, and even while they are in the classroom. Mitgang tells us that on top of all this, racism is conveyed in the children?s language.
In his poem, “Notes from the City of the Sun”, Bei Dao utilizes obscure imagery consistent with the Misty Poets and veiled political references to illustrate the struggles in Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution. The poem is sectioned into fourteen short stanzas containing imagery that are symbolic of the cultural hegemony in China under the rule of Mao Zedong. Bei Dao, born Zhao Zhen-kai, is an anti-revolutionary poet and one of the founders of a group known as the Misty Poets. The Misty Poets wrote poems that protested the Cultural Revolution led by Mao Zedong. Therefore, a lot of Bei Dao’s poems speak out against the Cultural Revolution and the restrictions that it placed on any form of art. Bei Dao’s poetry is categorized as “misty” because of the ambiguity in its references to Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. An obscure imagery that occurs twice in “Notes” is the sun imagery. Another imagery that depicts the injustice of the Cultural Revolution is the description of freedom as scraps of paper. In the poem, Bei Dao also equates faith to sheep falling into a ditch; this is a depiction blind faith during the Cultural Revolution. The purpose of this essay is to analyze how Bei Dao’s use of the Misty Poet’s ambiguous imagery and implicit political context in the poem “Notes from the City of the Sun” to illustrate the cultural hegemony in China under Mao.
The narrator, Le Ly Hayslip was born into a family of six in a town called Ka Ly in Vietnam. The villagers of Ka Ly fight for both side of the war; Hayslip’s own brothers were split between the communist north and the puppet government controlled south and so were her family. By day the village was looked over by Republicans, but by night they were under...